Thus far, this is my most successful project in terms of website traffic. ChicagoSpeakeasies.com gets over 3,000 visits a month, and it's growing.

I created the site very much to solve my own problem, and because it sounded like fun. I had no idea it was going to do this well.

Shortly after I moved to Chicago, an acquaintance I knew from college texted me. He had lived here for a little while since he graduated, and wanted to catch up. We hung out one afternoon a week or so later, and he told me about a little side hustle he had been building.

He had set up a "speakeasy tour" on Airbnb for residents or tourists that wanted to see cool, hidden bars around town. Chicago was a central city in America's prohibition era, and it's known for speakeasies and underground watering holes, at least historically.

Today, as my friend taught me, there aren't any more "true", legitimately illegal underground speakeasies - but there are a lot of really cool, hip bars that don't advertise. You usually have to know someone or hear about them by word of mouth. That's why the Airbnb tour was doing so well - it's tough to find these spots on your own.

My friend offered a free tour for me and my girlfriend, and about a week after our meeting, we took him up on his offer. We hit 3 different bars, all of them were super cool, and I got really interested in finding more. I asked how he had found the ones we saw that night and he responded "you just gotta know the right people."

Over the next few months, I got really into it. Anytime I felt bored, I quickly found myself scrolling through articles on "Chicago's best speakeasies."

I quickly ran into an issue though - even though there were 10-20 articles, each with their own top-10 ranking, they all pulled from around 15 bars in total. There were a ton of repeats, and after a couple weeks of casual research, I recognized every speakeasy I saw in every new article I found.

But there had to be more. Chicago is massive, and the three bars my friend showed us were rarely found on any of these top-10 articles. I was certain there were many MANY more of these little spots around the city that these big traffic-hungry websites hadn't taken the time to actually hunt down.

I had googled all there was to google, so my next strategy was Google Maps. I searched for speakeasy, and found the same cast of characters like before, but noticed a few new ones through reviews people had left. When they mentioned the term "speakeasy," sometimes the bar would show up for that search, even if the rest of their Google Maps listing said nothing of the sort.

So I kept searching in Google Maps for "speakeasy", "hidden bar", "secret club", etc. and I got a few more hits. I saved everything I found, and started checking out bars on the weekends that seemed especially promising from their listing. A few were duds, some people leave reviews saying something is a speakeasy, when it's really just dimly lit, or decorated a certain way.

So it became clear that if I wanted this to be a quality list, I had to at visit each location myself. So every weekend, I would plan a short route to two or three bars on my list, get a seat at the bar, order one drink or one appetizer, and write down some notes on what the establishment was like.

After I got back, I would re-write those notes into a mildly interesting review of the speakeasy on my website. Repeat that process for about two months, and I started to have a sizeable list of genuine speakeasy reviews.

For around the next 6 months, I popped into a bar or two, and casually kept building the list. It became a fun hobby, and a few of my friends started asking me for bar recommendations. It felt nice to have that little knowledge base in my back pocket, and to have people recognize it.

Eventually, I checked Google Analytics, and noticed a really sizeable amount of traffic to the site - and it was all through search.

Apparently, I was accidentally solving a problem other people had too - not just my own. To my surprise, without adding many more reviews to the site, traffic grew steadily.

A local journalism graduate student reached out to me over email, calling me the "speakeasy guy", and asking for an interview for an article she was writing about the speakeasy culture in the city. Eventually, that interview resulted in a lovely mention in The Chicago Reader.

The article didn't change much, but there's something special about getting on the local news. It's an old fashioned success milestone.

The site continued to grow, and I continued to write reviews when I had the opportunity. I've still got a sizeable list of speakeasies to visit, but I'll get around to them.

I made some small marketing pushes on Reddit (here and here) by posting a list of the most interesting speakeasies upfront, and subtly linking in the comments to my website. The posts did well, and they reinforced my standing on Google a bit. Plus, other Chicagoans in the comments helped me crowdsource some more for the list.

I made some slight additions to the list structure on the site recently, but beyond that, it's kind of just growing on it's own.

I was just solving my own problem, but I accidentally hit on an issue others have.